The Light of Life

by Edward W. Robertson

He didn't look back. "What are you doing?"

  "Attempting to preserve us," Gladdic said.

  "Is that going to work?"

  "I operate on the assumption that it will be better than nothing."

  Whether due to Gladdic's efforts or the panic racing through his veins, Dante's head cleared, if only for the moment. He ran as fast as he dared, gaze flicking between the path immediately before him and the next glint of gold marking the way forward. He no longer had a dragonfly to plot their course from above. If they lost the trail now, they were as good as dead.

  Sometimes they fell. When the cuts and scrapes were bad enough to slow them down, Dante healed them. When all they were was a little blood, he let them bleed. A thudding redness encroached on the edges of his vision. Every time he stumbled, or couldn't see the next golden marker, rage choked his lungs like he'd inhaled a draft of water.

  Volo's sandal broke a third time. Gladdic mended it with the ether, but they'd been running less than ten minutes more when it came apart yet again. The next time, it hardly lasted five before it sent Volo crashing to her knees. She screamed and hurled the broken sandal off the ridge as hard as she could.

  Gladdic spat a curse. "What will you do now, you fool?"

  "Run until my foot bleeds," Volo said. "And keeping running until it stops."

  She hopped in place, then broke into a dash Dante could hardly keep up with. It wasn't long before her foot left was leaving shiny dark blots on the stone. Nether darted from Gladdic's hand, healing her, if only for another minute.

  Dante couldn't say how long they ran for: even if he hadn't been distracted following the markers and smoothing the path, the red fog was suffocating his brain as badly as the haze of the Pastlands. At some point, Volo lost her other sandal, too. Dante's right foot felt warm. It was covered in blood. Rather than pain, all he felt was anger. He needed to find someone, and he needed to hurt them.

  Bare skin smacked against the rock. Dante glanced back and saw that Gladdic had fallen. Blays and Volo ran on. Dante glared after them, teeth clenched so tightly they squeaked.

  "Get up!" he yelled over Gladdic's body. "Get up, you worthless shit!"

  Drowning in fury, Dante drew back and kicked Gladdic in the ribs. The old man didn't stir. Dante kicked him again, hard enough to rock him on his side. His legs jutted from his jabat, as thin as the back legs of a dog and as wrinkled as a shirt tossed in the corner for days. Pathetic.

  Dante drew back his foot again. Something bobbed to the surface of his mind. Clarity. He calmed himself, the wrath raging around him like a windstorm while he was tucked away inside his house. The ether came. He let it flow down his body.

  Everything got…better. Dante crouched and shook Gladdic's shoulder. Nothing. The priest's skin, the easily-tanned complexion of a Mallisher, was now so white Dante could nearly see through it.

  He picked Gladdic up—the old man was as light as he looked—and stumbled onward. Blays and Volo were starting up the next hill. Dante slogged along, only smoothing the path where it was most treacherous. When he reached the top, he had to kneel and catch his breath, sending the nether into his muscles to wipe away their complaints.

  He didn't catch up to Blays and Volo for another mile. They were slumped next to an upthrust fist of rock painted with red swirls. They were as pale as fish bellies and their eyes were closed. As Dante approached, Blays' bloodshot eyes fluttered open.

  "Oh." Blays' voice came out in a croak. "Was going to ask if you'd carry Volo for a bit. But it looks like your hands are full."

  Dante sank down beside him, propping Gladdic against the rock. "When was the last time you saw a mark?"

  "Time ago. Some of it."

  "Do you remember which way we were going?"

  Blays swung his head about, mouth hanging open, brows lowered. "Up? Weren't we going up?"

  Dante grunted. "North. Which way is north?"

  "The sun is…there." Blays pointed to it—it was currently hanging to their left, painful and yellow—then traced his arm across the sky. "That means it came up over there. And there is up."

  "North."

  "Yes. North." Blays tried to push himself up, but his legs gave out. "My lower arms aren't working."

  Dante thought for a moment, then glowered at the dark stuff until the shadows rolled across their limbs. The fog pulled back a little. Able to think again, he stilled his mind and touched them both with ether, which seemed to help. He meant to turn it on Gladdic and Volo, but his supply was exhausted.

  "Not sure we'll get much further," he said. "That was all I had."

  Blays cracked his neck, looking a little better. "Don't worry, Volo and Gladdic are already asleep. If we all die, we can tell them it was their fault and they'll never be the wiser."

  They hoisted their charges and shuffled onward. Their progress was creeping. They'd barely made it over the next hill before the red fog stole in from the sides of their minds. Dante pushed on, barely able to see the way ahead, lost in the huff of his breathing and the thump of his wrathful heart. When his legs threatened to quit working, he called to the nether again. He wanted nothing more than to become part of the swirling darkness, to lose himself in its coldness, its hunger for blood.

  Blays lifted a shaky arm. Beneath his pale skin, his veins stood out like worms. "Look."

  Beyond the next line of hills, a single tree rose into the empty sky.

  Later, Dante couldn't remember crossing the final leg of their pilgrimage. All he could remember was the rage that seemed to define his every desire. And then, like being splashed with a bucket of water from a mountain-fed stream, it fell away: he had stepped out of the Hills and into the trees.

  He set Gladdic down and sat, leaning his back against a trunk. Blays found a spot across from him. The color was already returning to Blays' skin.

  Blays rubbed his hands into his eyes. "Care to tell me what just happened to us? Other than something horrible?"

  "This land kills all life," Dante said. "That's the only way the Yosein could turn back the White Lich and his armies."

  "But the Yosein are long dead. How can their enchantment have lasted this long?"

  "Maybe that's a reflection of just how much they hated him."

  "In other words, you have no idea."

  "Correct."

  One of Dante's dragonflies lay dead on the dirt twenty feet away. He reached for the nether, but it wouldn't come. Not because his strength was exhausted, though he knew he was close. But because the power of the Odo Sein refused to let him. Examining the others, everyone had a few cuts and scrapes on their elbows and legs, and Volo's feet oozed blood from the soles, but he didn't see anything critical.

  Gladdic's eyes fell open. He considered the trees around him and the towering pillars of stone at the bottom of the valley. "I exist."

  "And I mean to have strong words with the gods about that some day," Blays said. "In the meantime, we've got a job ahead of us. One that you insisted we do, I'll note."

  "What is our plan to make contact? To walk into their most secret temple, and pray they allow us to live?"

  "I was thinking I'd wait for them to send us a carriage." Dante pulled himself to his feet. "But now that you mention it, your way sounds faster."

  It was another minute before Volo came back to her senses. In that time, Dante didn't see anyone moving in the windows of the towers or in the green fields around them. There was a dirt path just to their right and Dante followed it downhill. After the neutral emptiness of the Hell-Painted Hills, the smell of leaves and pollen stopped up his nose like a bung.

  The path leveled out, delivering them from the forest. Pressure lifted from Dante's shoulders: he could reach the nether again. He was tempted to use it to heal their abrasions, but not knowing what awaited them at the academy, he saved his strength.

  In an echo of the settlements in the swamps, the grounds of the Silent Spires were composed of concentric circles. In the outermost ring, fruit trees grew unfettered, festooned with blo
ssoms of every color. Next came a ring of tidy crops starting to sprout from the jet black soil. After that came a ring of statuary, well-tended squares of decorative greenery, and a form of pavement achieved by smoothing out the natural rock of the Hills into a high gloss, then etching patterns and glyphs into the stone.

  And within it all rose the circle of towers. Seven in number, they soared two hundred feet high, capped by black domes marbled with the colors of fire. Their faces were peppered with arched windows, some of which opened to balconies.

  All of the rings were empty. There were no workers in the fields, no worshippers at the small shrine that stood in the center of the plaza between the towers. Wind buffeted the sprouts in the fields and tousled the flowers in the gardens.

  Dante swallowed. "Tell me the Drakebane didn't bring everyone from the Spires with him, too."

  He'd been angling for reassurance from Gladdic, but the priest said nothing.

  Dante touched the hilt of his sword, pulling the shadows close like a thick blanket on a winter night. He passed into the shadow of a tower, then back into the late afternoon sunlight as he entered the paved grounds in the middle of the towers.

  He stopped there and turned in a slow circle. "Hello? I'm a friend of Tanar Atain. We come seeking the order of the Knights of the Odo Sein."

  A leaf fluttered across the courtyard. The windows stayed silent.

  Blays waved his hands above his head. "Hey, people who dedicated your existence to not getting destroyed! Guess what? You're about to be destroyed!"

  Silhouettes moved within the windows. The tips of arrows winked in the waning sun. Dante shaped the nether into killing darts, but a great blankness slammed down upon him, locking both ether and nether in place.

  7

  Dante scrabbled for the nether with all that he had, but there was no defying the power of the Odo Sein. That was the very thing that had brought them to the Spires. Though he, Blays, and Volo were armed, there was no hope of fighting back. They were exhausted. Which ruled out running away, too.

  "Ah!" Blays quit waving his hands and held them above his head. "That destroying I was talking about? Not by us. By the Eiden Rane!"

  Archers advanced onto balconies, sighting down the white shafts of their arrows. As many as a score per tower. More than a hundred in all.

  "He tells no lies," Gladdic boomed. "The Eiden Rane has been released from the iron prison of the Riya Lase. He slaughters your people as we speak. We have fought him, but we cannot stop him. Not without your help."

  With the archers in position, quiet overtook the grounds once more. White cloths embroidered with orange patterns hung from either end of the temple in the center of the plaza, flapping away at themselves in a wind that felt as if it might never stop blowing.

  A door creaked open in the base of a tower across from them. Six men or women dressed in hooded white robes swept from the entry in perfect silence. They kneeled down in two rows of three, arrows trained on the intruders.

  A seventh figure walked into the light. She wore a robe, or something like it, but unlike the warriors, her arms were bare and her face was uncovered. She was tall and neither young nor old. Something in her bearing was so commanding that Dante hardly noticed as another six archers trotted from the doorway to join the others.

  She walked toward them, the wind pinning her robe to her legs and torso, rippling the orange stitching. Half of the warriors advanced with her while the others held their bows trained on the four outsiders. After thirty feet, the first grouped dropped into a crouch, arrows nocked, and the others popped up and dashed forward to flank the priestess.

  She came to a stop across from the four of them. Her light skin and dark hair marked her as Tanarian, but she was taller than most—taller than Dante, in fact, and nearly even with Blays and Gladdic. Despite being a priestess, and one in the middle of a rocky desert at that, the muscles of her arms and shoulders were fit for hard labor.

  Her stature would have drawn looks, but her face would have stopped feet. She was at least five years past the stage of life when nearly all young people were pretty, but that extra time had carved the excess softness from her cheeks and chin, granting her the beauty of a noble warrior.

  Her eyes locked on Gladdic. "Gladdic of Bressel. I know you."

  "I do not think so," he said. "I would have remembered if we had met."

  "The Drakebane spoke of you. He wasn't sure he could trust you."

  "Yet which of us is still here in service to your land?"

  She snorted in a way that Dante found annoyingly charming. "You, a foreigner, stay in our land to fight a battle that isn't yours, while the Drakebane, our emperor, abandons our land because he thinks that battle can't be won. One of you is a very big fool."

  "I'd put good money on both," Blays said. "Don't worry, my friend Dante will cover me."

  "You shouldn't have been able to get here. Not without adding four more gold markers to the trail. You two are warlocks." She nodded at Dante and Gladdic, then eyed Blays. "And there's something wrong about you, too, isn't there?"

  "Crippled brain," Dante said. "I'm afraid he was born with it."

  She nodded again, sympathetically. She frowned at Volo. "You're a roamer. Of the Veins? A merchant? No, there's something unsettling about you. Like opening your door to find a single banana has been placed on your stoop. You're with the Maggots."

  Volo bobbed her head. "Yes. Ma'am."

  "Did you bring these dirty hari here?"

  "No, ma'am. Is it ma'am?"

  "It isn't," the woman said. "Is the purpose of titles to show honor to those that bear them? Or to degrade yourself before your betters, and train you to do their bidding?"

  Volo straightened her back, looking deadly serious and a little alarmed to find herself in dana kide with someone of the woman's stature. "Do we know who first invented titles?"

  "No more than we know who invented the first floor beneath our feet, or the first way to tell a man that his mother's a whore-dog."

  "If the first title was invented by the one who bore it, then I'd say it was meant to degrade everybody else. But if it was made up by one of the everybody else, just another commoner, then I say it was meant to honor a good person."

  "And since I already admitted we can't know who invented titles, we can't know their intent. Classic dodge." She gave Volo a brief and not overly warm smile. "My title is Bel. I have a name, too, but it's mine, and I don't share it like drunks passing around their bottle. You can have it when you tell me your own names, and why I shouldn't kill you for trespassing in a place where no hari has ever set foot."

  "I'm Dante Galand," Dante said, deciding that lying might only get him in trouble down the line—and that he might need to impress her. "High Priest of Narashtovik."

  If this meant anything to her, she didn't know it.

  "Blays Buckler." Blays extended a hand, which the Bel ignored. "No title attached. Not because I don't deserve one, of course. But because a fancy title would only make it harder for me to do what I do."

  The woman tilted her head. "Which is?"

  "Save Narashtovik from disaster whenever its High Priest meddles in something he had no business with."

  "That's what brings you here? Meddling?"

  "If this is what meddling looks like," Gladdic said, "then we should all wish for our lives to have more priests and mothers-in-law. As stated, the Eiden Rane has returned. We seek to stop him."

  "And I seek to find a way to stop aging that doesn't involve dying. I think I'll have more luck at my job than you will."

  "I am inclined to agree. Yet we have faced him and survived."

  The Bel laughed, her pulled-back hair swaying as she wagged her head. "Do you even care if I believe you? While you're at it, why not tell me you're my long-lost father, thus I'm obliged to help you however I can?"

  "We got here to the Spires, didn't we?" Blays lifted his right elbow behind his head, stretching it with his other hand. "You know the weirdest part of it a
ll? Between the way his eyes shift between blues, and those granitey features of his, the lich is a pretty handsome fellow. I don't normally say that about a glowing giant who's trying to cut me in half with a glaive as big as a church steeple, but it happens to be true."

  She smirked, then swung her dark brows together like a closing gate. "But you saw him. You looked into his eyes, and then—the clash of weapons—an escape. How?"

  "We had the help of a few of your knights. Unfortunately, they didn't make it out."

  "They fought with great valor," Gladdic said. "They met their fate precisely as they were trained to."

  "If you were able to stand against him, why are you here?" She strode forward, startling her guards as she shoved at Gladdic. "You have to go back! You have to go back and you have to rip his heart in half with your sorcery!"

  With the guards on edge, Dante reached for the nether, but it was still being clasped in place by the knights concealed in the towers. "Why didn't we think of that before we poisoned ourselves marching through the Hell-Painted Hills? We can't stand against him, Bel. Not on our own. That's why we're here. Send your knights with us, and we'll destroy the White Lich."

  "You said that you've already fought him alongside the Odo Sein. And that he killed my knights and forced you to run away. Why would I send more good men to their deaths?"

  Gladdic straightened his jabat. "Have you heard of the theory of the prime body?"

  She doused him with a look of sheer disdain. "If you think we're that negligent in our duties, why come here at all?"

  "I don't follow your reasoning, my lady."

  "That's because you haven't bothered to think it through. We're the ones who uncovered the idea of the prime body in the first place. Even if we hadn't, a moment of thought would have led you to the conclusion that, in the course of our sworn duty of destroying the Eiden Rane, we might have heard of a method that would allow us to do exactly that."

  "Your people have sought out the body, then."

  "We've been seeking after it for centuries, Gladdic of Bressel. Before you waste my time, I'd suggest you go and find it, and only then return to the Spires. I'll be long dead by then, but I'm sure my granddaughter will be very accommodating to you."